AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

For earlier Chapters and an explanation of this dreadful story, see blog: The Cardiff Grandma. WARNING: This novel contains fake Welsh.
In the previous episode, the Vice kills Smithy with an ox. We now rejoin Samantha and the old Bangladeshi at a palatial mansion in Luxumborg

The Cardiff Grandma Chapter 38

Someone knew they were there alright. Someone other than the two individuals themselves that is. The old man strode forward in a purposeful manner. He was going through that door if it was the last thing it did. It may well have been the last thing he did for all he knew. He wasn’t psychic after all.

Samantha had a bad feeling about things. She was beginning to doubt the entire state of affairs. Was it just another of the producer’s elaborate practical jokes? Like the time they sent her on that urgent assignment to report on a ‘press conference’. And when she got there she found that it was exactly that – the annual conference of the Printing Press Manufacturers Association.

‘I have a bad feeling about this’, she uttered.

‘Relax Miss Wong. Everything will be just fine.’ With a majestic swagger to his cat-walk hips the old man waltzed through the now fully open door.

‘Nice entrance’ remarked Samantha.

Mistaking her appreciation of the architecture for a compliment the old man swung round. ‘Why thank you my dear, one does ones best. Diplomatic corps Ballroom dancing champion three years on the trot you know.’ He grinned at her and winked an overly long wink then added, ‘Foxtrot that is.’ He loved that line, he hadn’t got to use in ages but it still amused him. With a quickstep he was further into the building, Samantha following him with a corresponding step she lithely performed backwards and in highheels. They danced through an echoing foyer and into the center of a murky cavernous great hall, where they stopped. The chamber was deserted. There was no sign of their mysterious host. ‘Where is everybody?’ she puzzled aloud, but the oldster had pranced on toward a series of half-opened doors at the far end of the great hall. He turned and waggled his eyebrows at her, leering suggestively, his body language expressing his nearly religious belief that he was irresistible. ‘Shall we check in the bedrooms first?’ he drooled and resumed his jig across the parquetted floor.

‘Creep!’ she vocalized under her breath, but not quite far enough under. He heard her and rose up on to tip-toes, carefully and slowly placing each foot down as he continued.

She didn’t make the same mistake twice and only thought silently, ‘Jerk!’, which might have been an Americanism had she only known. But her mentalization was to no avail. He spasmed wildly as he snuck further into the deepest recesses of the mansion.

Not stopping to think she thought ‘Shit!’

It was only by great good fortune that the Bangladeshi’s sultana-like old buttocks had by now followed the rest of him into the deepest recesses of the mansion. Samantha was unfamiliar with the manor, though, and while she had no idea where he’d gone, she knew he had and was glad he’d shut the door behind him.

She strode over to an open window and stuck her out head out, inhaling the fresh Luxembourg air in huge gulps. She looked up into the sky and and noticed with amazement that it still hadn’t clouded over, that not a shred of fog was to be seen drifting its tattered fingers across the lawns like a ragtag army of weary and defeated ghosts. No, the heavens were still azure, cirrus-free and non-cummulus, the color of periwinkles. It was so clear she could make out the lettering on the low-flying delivery plane as it ambled overhead: Tex Tyle’s Textiles. She could even see the bomb bay open, count the freckles on the face of the crew member and read the namepatch on his shirtpocket – S. Quito – as he jettisoned some cargo, and she watched as the long roll of fabric came tumbling through the sapphire air, tumbling end over end, down out of the cerulean firmament.

It struck her like a bolt from the blue. Wong!

The old man had called her by the Wong name! What was going on? she quizzed. He, for his part had been waiting for her to realize his deliberate ‘error’ ever since he’d uttered it. She was confused: even if he’d deduced that she was her uncle’s niece, which was highly unlikely, why would he have supposed her real name was the same as her uncle’s? It wasn’t. It wasn’t Wong it was White. This bore, thinking about, she supposed, family ties she’d thought secret, had wrongly apellated her, and she was running dangerously low on commas at the worst possible time; but she had no time to ponder this now. Reminded that she had reminded herself to remind herself to remember her uncle’s cryptic message, she remembered it now:

Dogs and rugs and Geckos?
They always come in Twos?
Be they lizard wool or Corgis?
Be they R_ - -- tali hoe -?

She knew what lizard wool was, of course, and R tali hoe probably referred to the Plymouth Hoe somehow, but overall it was senseless. She tried the classical code reading down instead of across: Dogs they be be and always they they rugs come R and in wool tali Geckos in or hoe twos Corgis… Something stirred in her memory…what was it? a wooden ladle? a runcible spoon? a swizzle stick? If she could just – but at that moment a personage entered the room and it looked a helluva lot like Lassie.

‘Lassie?’ Samantha breathed incredulously, hardly daring to hope. ‘Is that you, girl?’

The animal lifted its head and barked twice, adopting the universal canine code of one bark for no and two for yes, as if to say ‘Affirmitive. Over.’

Samantha felt for her ferret, battered and barely clinging to its perch, but clutching it in trembling hands famed for their opposable thumbs, she slowly guided it dogward. She’d never had a dog and was surprised when Lassie swallowed it. Not as surprised as Lassie was though.

Samantha Panther would soon make her name with an exclusive reclusive celebrity interview billed as ‘Inside Lassie’, but she did not appreciate the fact at that nanosecond as she was mourning the loss of the ferret. The ferret had been the invention of a friend of a friend of her uncle’s. Purchased from a pet shop, it had been retrofitted to accommodate a ‘microphone’ with the cable strung through the guides of a fly fishing rod. When the rig was new, it had been possible to raise and lower the ferret using the reel, but the pole had been gnawed and broken and lost pieces of itself over time and now looked like a chopstick with a frayed electrical wire stapled to it. The stick could be replaced, but the ferret! It had made her voice renowned, it possessed resonances not available in other stores, and she had nothing to replace it with.

The nanosecond came to a close and Samantha, suddenly realizing the potential for a gut-wrenching story, brightened as a chandelier overhead was lit, candle by candle by the Bangladeshi, who was on a stepladder somewhere directly above her cleavage, holding a lighter in one hand and a compact camera in the other.

Lassie, unnoticed and miffed, had left the house.